The Bad Samaritan (7 page)

Rosemary sat back and let it roll over her. It wasn't pleasant, but these days one's ear was used to unrelenting noise: one had only to go into the centre of Leeds to be assaulted by sounds of diggers, demolition trucks, high-speed drills and chain saws, and every pub she knew had music in various degrees of loudness in the background. Florrie in a small room produced much the same effect as the drills and the chain saws. Sometimes Rosemary made an effort to check her flow, but on this occasion she knew that eventually Florrie was going to have to get to a question that demanded from her an answer. After ten minutes or so it came.

“Now, what I'm sure would be best, Rosemary dear, would be if you resigned now as vice-chair, just went quietly. Everyone will understand, and there certainly won't be any criticism, and that way there won't be any nastiness, and I'm sure that for Paul's sake—who we all respect so much—that's what you'd want to avoid.”

Rosemary wanted to object that bringing Paul into it like that was fighting dirty, but she kept the other cheek resolutely turned. The monologue went on a bit longer, but eventually Florrie had to draw to a close and look interrogatively at Rosemary.

“I'm just going to leave it to the members,” she said.

There was a silence of several seconds. Florrie glared, then smiled forgivingly.

“I don't think you've been following, Rosemary dear. What we felt was there'll be so much less nastiness if you—”

“There's been no nastiness, Florrie. You've all been very nice about it. So there'll be no need for any in the future. I'll just go to the next full meeting, tell them the problem (though of course everyone knows by now) and then leave the meeting and they can take the decision.”

“Oh Rosemary dear that is
awfully
unwise. Because if you were quietly to resign now saying it's because after all it is a
church
organisation and you'd feel out of place
now
, you wouldn't get the same feeling of rejection as you will if—”

“I'm sorry, Florrie. I won't feel rejected at all. I've made up my mind. I'm afraid I have to go now. I've said I'd go and do some shopping for Mrs Gumbold. I believe you've been helping her since she's been laid up. She told me about your visit. So kind. She needs everyone rallying around now . . .”

And she ushered her to the front door, through it and out to the gate, leaving her time for only a few parting shots.

“I
wish
you would think again Rosemary, because we've all got your interests at heart and—”

Rosemary was just turning to go in again when she realised that a BMW had pulled up in the road opposite, on the park side, its windows down. Dark Satanic Mills got out and lounged over the road, a smile playing on the corners of his lips.

“Good for you, Rosemary. I like a woman who fights.”

He didn't say it sexily, but somehow there was sex in the background.

“Good morning, Stephen. What can I do for you?”

He left a pause, to suggest that there was a variety of things he could think of. That was the trouble with overtly sexy people: almost anything one said seemed capable of a second meaning when one talked with them.

“I think Paul has missed out on one of the account books for the Rotarians,” he said easily. “Not important, but I need it to get the whole picture. I should think it will be in his study. Any chance of my coming in to have a look for it?”

Rosemary led the way in, and then watched him as he rummaged around for it. As she was watching she considered her reactions to him. Of course the “Satanic” epithet was absurd. No one imagined him indulging in devil-worshipping rituals with children, or dipping his hands into disembowelled animals or
birds. Still, the word somehow did seem to fit him: there hovered over him the
possibility
of evil. In fact, Rosemary could imagine all sorts of nastinesses, shading off into outright evil, and could fit them in with his character. And yet, as Paul said, he had been a regular churchgoer in the parish for well over a decade now.

Why did he come? There was not the slightest suspicion of anything spiritual about him. Yet on consideration Rosemary would have had to admit that the same was true of quite a number of the St Saviour's regulars. Yet about Dark Satanic Mills there hung an air of earthiness, greed, sensuality and a total lack of scruple, and
that
was not something that could be said of the other less-than-spiritual communicants. He's not at all
churchy
, she said to herself. He's amoral, outside any code of ethics, totally self-absorbed. Perhaps in the nineteenth century such a man would go along to church to establish some kind of credentials, leading enthusiastically a second life of sin and corruption. But at the latter end of the twentieth century? Today nobody could be
bothered
with that sort of hypocrisy. So why was Mills?

“There it is,” said Stephen Mills, making a quick dart and taking a heavy ledger from among books of theology and paperbacks of popular devotion. “What an odd shelving system your husband has.”

“It's all his own,” agreed Rosemary, waiting for him to go. He stood there, clutching the book to his chest, smiling at her—
knowing
she was wanting him gone.

“So what are the old biddies on about?” he asked.

Rosemary played for time, unwilling to discuss her personal position with him.

“Mrs Harridance wouldn't thank you for calling her an old biddy. She's a woman in the prime of life.”

“You haven't answered my question.”

“I don't think I need to, Stephen. You always have your finger on the pulse of the parish.”

He smiled, almost purred, in self-satisfaction.

“So it's your sudden godlessness, is it? I guessed as much. What do they want? For you to parade down the Ilkley Road in penitential sackcloth?”

“They want—Mrs Harridance wants—me to give up any parish positions I hold.”

“And you?”

“I'm just leaving it up to the members.”

“Isn't that good enough for her?”

“No. Because she's afraid they'll support me. She wants me to resign quietly so there's no contest.”

“Why?”

“Because she wants to be chairwoman of the Mothers' Union, and she wants one of her cronies as deputy, not someone who knows her for what she is—on the make.”

She regretted saying that as soon as it was out of her mouth. What
was
it about Dark Satanic Mills, that he could screw things out of you even as you felt distrustful and repelled? And what else was Mills himself but on the make?

“What is there in these jobs?” asked Mills, seemingly genuinely curious. “What's in it for them?”

“Nothing in your sense,” said Rosemary. “Nothing in the way of money or contacts or suchlike. But position, prestige, something to bustle about, be self-important about.”

Mills had nodded when she talked about money and contacts, the little smile playing around his lips as she showed him how she viewed him—which was probably why he had asked the question in that form in the first place. As usual, he'd got what he wanted. Now he started for the door.

“Very odd, that's what I say. Well, I must be on my way. Tell
Paul I've collected this, will you, Rosemary? And—” he put his face close to hers—“go on fighting back. Show them what you're made of.”

But over the next week Rosemary found very little call for fighting or for showing what she was made of. If anybody brought up the matter of her loss of faith she repeated the formula of “leaving it up to the members” of any organisation she was involved with to decide whether it made any difference. But very few people brought it up. It was increasingly accepted: it had happened, it was nobody's fault, and Rosemary was just the same person she had always been. It had been a nine days' wonder, and the nine days were over. Rosemary could imagine that when she brought the matter before the Mothers' Union committee the members' main reaction would be to wonder why she had raised it at all.

She was told by a friend that Florrie Harridance had tried to get a local
Yorkshire Post
reporter interested in the matter as a news story. But in the reporter's view it had not had the human interest to compete with the declining fortunes of Leeds United or the total hopelessness of the Yorkshire cricket team. It lacked sex, passion or fanaticism, and news stories involving clergy and their families had to have at least one of those. The reporter had shaken his head and gone on his way.

Rosemary went about her parish work as usual, but she no longer went to church on a Sunday. This meant that she saw much less of Florrie Harridance and her cronies. She did bump into Selena Meadowes one day in the library, and they fell into their usual topic of conversation, the needs of several elderly members of the congregation. For once, though, Selena gave the conversation a personal twist.

“You can't tell me anything about the decline of the elderly,” she said, still in her bright tone which seemed so inappropriate.
“My poor old Mum seems to have less and less interest in life every time I see her or call her.”

“I didn't know you had elderly parents, Selena.”

“One, just the one: my mother.”

“You must have been a late child.”

“I was. What can you do, Rosemary, if they just seem not to want to go on living any more?”

“I don't know. My mother's still very lively. Isn't she interested in the grandchildren?”

“Not very. Oh—I'm being unfair. She likes to
see
them, but then quite soon she's had enough and wishes they'd go away. I wonder whether I shouldn't try a change of scene for her.”

“Where does she live?”

“Near Skipton. She used to go to Morecambe for her holidays when my father was alive, but she says she wouldn't want to go back, with all the changes, and from what I hear it's a depressing place now. I wondered whether to try to get her to Scarborough.”

“Well, I certainly enjoyed it. But it might be less attractive for someone who's less active. All those hills.”

“Where did you stay?”

“It's a place called Cliff View. On St Nicholas's Cliff, near where Anne Brontë died.”

Selena Meadowes bridled a little.

“That's literary, isn't it? We're not a very literary family, I'm afraid. Is the food good—traditional, I mean? She's very conservative.”

“Yes—anyhow it's perfectly decent.”

“I think I might try taking her myself. Then she might stay a fortnight, if I got her really settled in, and I could go and fetch her and take her home.”

They smiled and parted then, and the conversation passed from Rosemary's mind as she went about her usual duties, which
did not get any less onerous. It was over a week later, when Selena Meadowes's name came up in conversation with Paul over dinner, that Rosemary said:

“I didn't realize she had an elderly mother, going towards senility.”

“Really?” Paul said, looking up. “That is sad. I met her once, a year or two ago. Perfectly spry and interested in everything—I wouldn't have said she was more than sixty.”

Rosemary knew, from more than one case in the parish, how sadly early Alzheimer's disease could strike. It was a horrific stalking-horse, a terror more actual to most than AIDS. She said no more, but the subject of Selena's mother—or, more particularly, Selena's motives—remained in the back of her mind.

She rang her own mother that evening, while Paul was out at a Parochial Church Council meeting. Her mother was a lively old lady living in Lincoln, very much taken up with clerical controversies and quarrels, of which there were an inordinate number in Lincoln. Rosemary had been keeping her loss of faith from her, but thinking of Selena Meadowes's mother made her decide that this was the sort of misplaced consideration that the old could do without—that it was, in fact, positively insulting. Her mother took the revelation in her stride, was almost dismissive.

“Probably your time of life,” she said. “It will pass. It's probably due to your having
so much
to do with Christians. They can be very depressing, you know. How are the children?”

The question made Rosemary think how much more sensibly her mother had reacted than her son. There was a lot to be said for experience—she hoped Mark would be able to learn from it when it came to him. She was just telling her mother about her son, and trying to keep her irritation with him out of her voice, when the front doorbell rang.

“Must go, Mother. Someone at the door.”

It was half past nine—late for a parishioner to visit. She put down the receiver, hurried to the door and put on the front light. Not a shape she recognised. But she had no apprehensions and opened the door. It was Stanko, an appealing, apologetic smile on his face.

“Rosemary, can you help me please? I am in much trouble.”

R
osemary drew Stanko inside and led him through to the living room. She looked at him in the better light there.

“You look tired,” she said, “and hungry.”

“A little,” said Stanko. “I was told I must go middle morning. I went to do packing—” he gestured towards a pathetically small and ill-filled knapsack—“and then I said good-bye and went to coach station. Coach is cheaper, you see. When we get to Leeds I have great difficulty finding bus to Abbingley—everybody very kind and try to help but I go wrong.”

“Well, sit down. I'll get you a hot drink, and then I'll make you an omelette or something.”

Rosemary found she rather enjoyed fussing over Stanko, as he had fussed over her in the dining room at Cliff View. She lit the gas fire because the evening was getting chilly, made him a pot of coffee, then made a big mushroom omelette with a salad and opened some tins to make some kind of sweet. She was just sitting down opposite him and saying, “Now,” when she heard Paul's key in the door. She smiled at Stanko encouragingly, said “Don't worry” and slipped out into the hall.